


Heal

by gingersauce



Category: RWBY
Genre: Gen, Multi, i dont know where this is gonna go or whos gonna be in it, i just wanted to write trans jaune, ill update the stuff if i can i honestly forget how this site works, this has like depictions of homophobia and transphobia in it so be careful
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-01 22:20:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23704516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingersauce/pseuds/gingersauce
Summary: in which we find out why we never see jaune's parents, ever.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 28





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> before you read this i just wanna say that 1. noa is indeed jaune and 2. i apologize for this being so slow i promise i'll update soon with actual good stuff i just wanted a decent preface to what i plan to have happen next

When Noa Arc is eleven years old, her mother purchases her a training bra. It is simple and white and doesn’t do much. She is instructed to try it on, and at first Noa thinks nothing of it. She’s never worn one before, and before this point had never even thought of growing in that way. Every time she’d been told about puberty it’d gone in one ear and out the other.  
Her biggest concern in that regard was that she’d desperately hoped her voice got deeper. She’d found it shrill and annoying and every time she spoke at a louder-than-normal volume, she felt this heavy wave of- well, some sort of negative emotion. She didn’t really know which one it was.  
So when Noa Arc is given this training bra, she walks into her room and wrestles with it until it is over her head, shoulders, chest. It feels, she thinks, like there is a boa constrictor around her chest. She slowly stands up to look in the mirror. The imaginary snake tightens drastically and she’s forced to take it off. She turns away from the mirror before she does this, it always felt weirdly inappropriate to look at herself before she had clothes on anyways.  
The bra comes off and she is tempted to rip it apart, just because she is eleven and angry and disgusted with it for strangling her, but she resists. Her mom had spent money on it for her and if she ripped it they wouldn’t take it back.  
She returns it to her mother and mumbles, “It didn’t fit.”  
Her mom nods and reassures her that she will go up a size the next time she buys one. Noa feels nauseous at the thought of ever trying one on again. 

When Noa Arc is twelve years old, she goes to the drugstore with her mother and two of her sisters. There’s a display up near the makeup with a poster that features a tall woman in a bikini with little left to the imagination. Noa stares.  
She’s so pretty… She thinks to herself, and reaches out to touch the picture of the woman without thinking, and her hand lands on the woman’s bright red lips.  
“Ooooh! Noa!” Her sister exclaims. Noa pulls her hand away immediately, her thoughts snapping back to reality.  
“What?” She asks defensively. It’s not like she was doing anything wrong, right?  
“You’ve never looked at makeup like that before! I’m telling mom you want that lipstick!” Noa watches as she runs and tugs their mother’s sleeve. She didn’t even want the lipstick, she never thought that she needed to look ‘pretty’. Her other sister approaches.  
“Is there a booooy?” She teases. “Which color will he like?”  
Noa turns bright red. There’s absolutely no way that there is a boy. There’s not a single boy she knows that would like her with lipstick on. All her boy friends (friends who are boys! she specifies to herself, Not “boyfriends”!) like her because she is just like them, she likes bugs and studying big explosions in school and playing video games with them. And she liked it that way! She liked taking part in their funny pranks, and their adventures, and most of all she liked not having to deal with the drama that girls had with each other. She had seen enough of her sisters’ sleepovers with their friends end in tears or yelling or someone going home for her to know that there was no way that she would ever be friends with girls. At least not in middle school.  
Her mom returns. “Thank goodness you’re finally taking an interest in feminine things,” she sighs. “Which one do you want?”  
Noa grabs a pink colored one from the display without even giving it a second glance and hands it to her. She loses it under her bed three days later, without even having opened it. 

Six months later, Noa Arc’s thirteenth birthday comes and she is given her own scroll by her parents. They’d been very strict until this point and made sure that Noa knew they would take it from her and check it if they suspected anything bad. Noa had used their family computer before, but mostly just for schoolwork, and had never been granted the freedom to use the internet or contact her friends without having to wait for at least one other person to be done with the family computer first.  
She immediately runs to her room and plugs all her friends’ contacts into her new scroll, excitedly texting her friends about it. There’s already a text waiting, from her sister Saphron. Saphron is four years older than Noa, so she’s seventeen, and she is the closest to her out of all her sisters. It says, “happy birthday N!!!” Noa smiles, and walks to Saphron’s room to say thank you.  
Noa knocks, loudly and annoyingly. “Lemme innnnnnnn….!!!!”  
“Just a minute!” Saphron responds through the door, and within the minute she has opened it for Noa’s entry.  
“Here comes the birthday kid, on their thirteenth birthday...!” She sings, bowing before Noa as she enters the room. Noa picks a pillow up from the floor and hits her with it playfully. Saphron laughs and grabs the pillow back, tossing it on her bed. “So, how’s it feel to be a teen?”  
“I dunno,” Noa responds carefully. “I know it’s supposed to be my birthday and all, but I’m really scared to get older. Sorry for being a downer,” she laughs awkwardly.  
“I get that,” Saphron replies  
“And then there’s this whole thing with… I dunno,”  
“Thing with what?”  
Noa sighs. “Promise you won’t tell Mom and Dad?”  
Saphron nods.  
“I haven’t been wearing the stupid bras Mom’s been buying me. It feels like I’m suffocating when I put one on. And it isn’t the sizes, we’ve tried every possible size, it just seems like…” She pauses. “Like having a chest is a weakness. I don’t want anyone to think I have them. And they hurt.”  
Saphron nods understandingly. “I get what you mean.”  
“Really?” Noa perks. “So this is normal?”  
Saphron looks as though she is about to say something very important, but instead, she says, “that’s for you to figure out! You’ve got your whole self to figure out while you’re a teen, I’m not gonna get in the way.”  
Noa nods, not understanding at all. 

A perfect storm of events happens three days before Noa’s first day of high school, nothing that anyone could have ever predicted. The first thing is that, while texting a group chat composed of a few of Noa’s guy friends, someone gets called ‘fag’. Noa’s never seen or heard the word before, and when she searches for it on her scroll’s internet function the definition comes up.  
She stares at the screen as results appear. The links all take her to websites that define it as a ‘derogatory term for a gay man’. She wonders why her friend would be called gay. He’d never really talked about it before, but Noa knew at this point that she was a little naive and sheltered. Having parents who were never available or willing to talk about real-life issues was a little tough, especially when in the cases that they did, everything they said seemed so hateful. She was old enough to know what being gay was, but she’d never really seen it in real life or anything.  
She quietly wonders to herself if her friend is really gay, or if anybody she knows is gay, secretly.  
“Oh my god, what if I’m gay?” the words fall out of her mouth before she can stop them. She’d never even considered that. Like, yeah, girls are pretty, but do I like them? Do I want to kiss them? She stops for a second. No, I don’t really want to kiss anyone right now. Not even boys.  
But wait, if I don’t want to kiss boys, doesn’t that make me gay?  
Noa panics and runs into Saphron’s room, having no idea what to do.  
“Saph-” she stopped the second her gaze fell on her sister. Saphron was crying. “What happened?” Noa asks.  
“N,” she began slowly. “I don’t know what to do.”  
“What happened?” Noa repeats.  
“You know how, like,” she hiccups, crying harder, “I dated that boy when I was in sophomore year?”  
“Yeah?”  
“He’s gonna tell everyone that I’m a lesbian! I can’t- I can’t do this, what if Mom and Dad find out, I…”  
Noa freezes. “You’re a lesbian?”  
Saphron nods, still crying. “My ex found out that me and Terra from science class are dating and he’s gonna post it everywhere and they’re gonna see… What do I do?”  
Noa has no idea what to do, she knows their parents had been disgusted by women kissing on a show they’d liked a few weeks ago, but they’d never hurt any of their children, and she tells Saphron this.  
She nods, and tells Noa to go to her room, just in case.  
When the yelling starts, Noa is only a little surprised. She peeks her head out of her door and sees a few of her sisters doing the same.  
“Get the hell out of my house!” her dad screams. “We will not tolerate any of your homosexual lifestyle in my home!”  
Noa closes her door, terrified. Saphron wails, begging for them to please, just let her stay, please just understand.  
But they remain adamant, and a few minutes later, Saphron knocks on Noa’s door and tells her goodbye, sliding a note under her door that she immediately grabs and stuffs in her pocket. When Noa opens her door, Saphron is gone, and Noa has no idea where.  
When Noa awakens the next day, Saphron is still gone and the house feels empty. She’d be starting high school in two days, and none of her older sisters had given the same amount of guidance that Saphron had. Most of her sisters were equally as distressed as her, though, and she spent the day letting them braid her hair, which had been messy ever since she’d started shoving it in a beanie and forgetting about it, and having them teach her parts of old dance routines. Noa knew that being upset would only make everything worse, so she tried her best to let her sisters keep her mind off it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> shit hits the fan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wrote ten pages and i'm sorry for everything i write being long winded but god i am so invested in this story right now. next chapter hopefully noa will change name and pronouns and it will be a little more familiar and less confusing

Noa Arc doesn’t talk to her parents for the next few days. It’s an easy task, they’re always busy with something or another with any of her sisters, and when her first day of high school rolls around, her mother tells her to get up and ready so she can catch the bus, and Noa says nothing back. Her mother doesn’t notice.  
She gets on the bus. She’d never had any friends on her bus, and now that people are leaving mainstream school to train to be hunters and huntresses, there seems to be less friendly faces than she remembers on her middle school bus. She avoids the back and places herself strategically in the middle, where she can’t be called names for sitting at the front, nor be bullied by the older kids who sit in the back. A girl who’d just boarded the bus sits across from Noa who seems friendly enough, and Noa decides she will talk to this girl. First, however, she adjusts her outfit. Her long blonde hair is tucked into her beanie and her clothes are free of any stains or lint. Perfect.   
“Hey, what’s up?” Noa asks. “I haven’t seen you on the bus before. Are ya new?” She smiles.   
The girl looks her over a few times. Her face contorts into one of disgust. “Are you a boy or a girl?”  
Noa’s jaw drops, figuratively. She’s trying not to take offense and outwardly tries to play it off as a joke. “Well, um,” she laughs, “I-”  
“That’s what I thought. Don’t talk to me, creep.”  
Noa turns back to face the back of the seat in front of her, head full of thoughts.

High school goes over okay, but Noa slowly watches her friends disappear. Schools from across Remnant are scouting children, appearing in gym classes, and taking her friends, one by one. She tries to keep in touch, and fails. The friends who stay in mainstream high school don’t talk to her much, they’ve found better friends or girlfriends or, really, anything but her. She thinks a lot about the one girl’s comment on her first day, and she thinks about it a lot.   
Like, I’ve always been a girl, I can’t really change that. Not her fault she didn’t know, but she didn’t have to be rude about it, she thinks, but begins to imagine what it would be like if she had been born a boy. She was sure that this was normal behavior for teenage girls, especially tomboyish ones like her.   
Well, first, she thinks she’d get her hair cut. Girls were supposed to have long hair, usually, but she’d seen a few exceptions on both sides. She touches her hair impulsively and thinks about how much she hates the way she looks with it as long as it is, and how she makes an effort to hide it because of this.   
Second, she would pee standing up. Just to see what that was like. Any time she’d tried before, it hadn’t gone over well.   
Third, she’d be shirtless all the time. All the time, any given moment. And when she wasn’t shirtless she’d wear those stupid tank tops all the boys wore with the comically large arm holes. That would be funny, she thinks. And she wouldn’t hate her voice so much, that was for sure. Boy voices were so much less annoying than girl voices. And then, she’d become a hunter. Boys were always better at everything, and if she was a huntress, people wouldn’t respect her nearly as much.   
She writes these as bullet points in a notebook. This same notebook holds numbers of her friends, and the piece of paper her sister had given her before she’d been kicked out. At any given moment, Noa wants to read it, but doesn’t want to cry, considering it was probably a small goodbye letter. She figured she’d read it eventually, but for now, in the notebook it stays.   
Later that night, she wonders if anyone’s ever changed their gender. She knew that sometimes people got surgeries or something, but even that was a vague and nonsensical idea in her head that didn’t really happen, right? Well, she was about to find out.  
Can you change your gender? She asks her scroll, typing it into the search bar furiously under the covers after she’d been told to go to sleep.   
Results appeared one by one as they loaded onto the screen.   
“Am I Transgender?” A link to a quiz site asks. She doesn’t really know what transgender means.  
“FTM before and after pictures!” A blogging site advertises to her. She doesn’t know what ‘FTM’ means, either.   
“Gender Confirmation surgeons near you,” another website says. She scrolls a little farther.  
“How to change your gender!” She clicks this link without thinking, justifying it with a curiosity for wondering how other people do it. It’s got easy steps.  
“Step 1. Begin looking and dressing the way you feel comfortable.” It shows a picture of a girl cutting her hair, and a boy putting on a dress.  
“Step 2. Change your name and pronouns.” Is that all there was to it? Noa had seen people put pronouns on their social media profiles before, but had never really thought about why. As for changing a name, she’d always thought that was for people who didn’t like their name, but she guessed that if you wanted to change your gender then you’d probably have to go by something different than your original name. ‘Noa’ was a gender neutral name in itself, but she figured if she were to change her name she’d change it to something like ‘Jeanne’ or something. She had always thought it was a pretty name, but if she was changing her name to a boy’s name hypothetically, she would choose the more masculine ‘Jaune’. It seemed like a name for someone happy. Like the color yellow. She finds a pen on her nightstand and doodles the name ‘Jaune’ on her arm, just so she doesn’t forget it.   
“Step 3. If you’re questioning being transgender, see a specialist.”   
There was that word again, ‘transgender’. She closes the tab with the steps, feeling relatively satisfied with that, and searches this new word.  
“Transgender: adjective  
denoting or relating to a person whose sense of personal identity and gender does not correspond with their birth sex.”  
Noa stops. That was most certainly her, but she wasn’t, transgender, was she?  
She’d always felt like she didn’t look like a girl, or feel like one, and of course there was the fact that any time she’d put on a bra she felt wrong, somehow, but she wasn’t actually transgender, right?  
But there the definition was. She types in one last search.   
Am I Transgender?

Noa woke up the next morning, exhausted from the night before. She’d been up until about eleven p.m., taking quizzes that gave her inconclusive results, which meant, they all gave her one answer when she answered them truthfully, but she didn’t know how to feel about it, and they all said the opposite when she lied on the tests just for validation, but it didn’t really give her any because she knew she was lying. She’d also done extensive research into what it meant to be transgender.   
She took a deep breath. Her clothes were in her dresser, as always, but this time she pointedly picked out something a little different than usual: athletic shorts she usually kept for gym class, a pair of mid-calf socks, and a big hoodie that hid her form fairly well. Her beanie also found its way to her head as usual, and she’d been extra careful tucking her hair in today. She’d read that anything that hid your chest made you ‘pass’ as transgender better, and while she was still unsure of the label herself, she was trying something new today, and it was only just to see. She rushed out the door before her mother could see her.   
As she rode the bus, she wondered if Saphron would be proud of her. Saphron had been brave while being herself, too, and she’d gotten kicked out, but Noa knew that she’d never give up on her identity just because of a little hardship. It was the kind of person she was. Noa just hoped that this transgender thing she herself was going through ended soon and that her parents never found out about it. 

Days pass. Noa continues to dress the way she’d learned how. She even convinces a teacher, who’d seen her on her way to class late and told her to, “get to class, young man”. However, that and other small incidents aside, she stops really noticing how other people perceive her. She’s happy, her parents hadn’t suspected anything, her sisters had ignored it, and everything that she wore just sort of felt right, if that even made sense.  
Three weeks in, they catch on.   
“Noa Arc, what are you wearing?” Her mother gasps as Noa enters. She’d forgotten her mother had a day off from work today, and winces immediately at her own incompetence.   
“It’s just athletic clothes,” she says. It’s a half truth, they are just athletic clothes, but not to her.   
“Honey, you look like a tranny. What happened to the skinny jeans I bought you? Or that nice pink blouse?”   
“I wear them,” Noa lies. “I just wanted to be comfy today, you know?” She shrugs and attempts to walk past before the discussion goes any further.   
“No she doesn’t!” giggles one of her little sisters, who had poked her head out of her door. Another one appeared in the doorway too and nodded.  
“Uh huh,” she chimed in.   
“Noa doesn’t wear anything but BOY clothes!” a third shouted.  
“Girls, settle down,” insisted her mother. “Noa, we’ll talk when your father gets home. Go put on something pretty for dinner.” 

The next hour is agonizing. Noa paces her room, pulls clothes out of her dresser, puts them back, paces again, picks up her scroll, puts it down, and when she finally hears the door open and the sound of her father saying hello to her mother, she throws on the most available blouse and pair of jeans combo and waits.  
And waits.  
She was seriously considering just jumping out the window at this point, but she knows she has to be rational, so instead she wonders what Saphron would do. Noa knows if she lies just enough that she won’t meet the same fate as her older sister, but she doesn’t know exactly how to do it.  
She digs in her notebook and finds the small piece of paper given to her the last time she saw Saphron, and is about to open it-  
“Noa, get out here!” Her father barks, and Noa hastily shoves the piece of paper deep into her left front pocket as she walks out of her room. Her hands and legs are shaking wildly, it’s out of her control to stop them.   
“What’s this I hear about you only wearing boy clothes?”  
“Well, I-”  
“Are you trying to be a boy?” He shouted.   
“N-no, I-”  
“Hand over your scroll.”  
“It’s in my room,” she replies, and slowly walks back to her room to go find it. Her father follows. There’s no way she can delete her search history without him seeing, so she’s toast. She feels a sinking feeling deep in her chest as she hands it over. Her father immediately clicks onto her text messages. The last one is to her mother, and messages between friends or classmates are few and far between. She hopes that he gives up there, but he goes to her browser history next.   
She suspects he sees the word ‘transgender’ and nothing else, because he’s only looked at it for what seems like half a minute before he throws it to the ground. It shatters. Her father looks at her with an expression of disgust she’s never seen before.   
“Get… Out.” He says, his voice seething with anger. “I will not have any faggots in my goddamn house, not you, not your fucking sister, nobody.”   
Noa is trembling, snot and tears covering her face, but she tries not to sob and wipes her face frequently. “I-”  
“Get OUT!” He screams.  
Noa stands, and the second she can find her balance, she runs, tripping over her own feet.  
“You can’t make her leave too! I don’t wanna lose another s-”  
Noa closes the door before she can hear her sister finish the rest. 

She walks for two hours. The sun is setting, and it’s sprinkling lightly. She doesn’t know where she’ll go or when she’ll stop, but considering she has no close friends to speak of and no relatives that she knows who live anywhere nearby, she figures she will keep walking. She doesn’t have any money. She doesn’t have a scroll anymore, either. She’s almost fourteen and she’s homeless, and she reflects on that fact bitterly.   
Noa passes a convenience store advertising candy and snacks, and it takes her less than a second to realize how hungry she actually is. Again, she doesn’t have any money, and she knows that if she gets caught for stealing it would make everything worse, but she goes inside anyways. Her pockets are empty, but she reflexively checks for her scroll anyways. Inside her back pocket she finds a piece of pocket lint and a paper clip.  
Suddenly, she remembers her sister’s note. It had to still be there, she’d put it there before everything went wrong and it hadn’t fallen out, that she’d known of. Anything from Saphron would make her feel a little better.   
The note says the name ‘Terra Cotta’ and some contact information, including an address.  
Noa doesn’t know what that is supposed to do for her. She figures the first bit was a name, that much is obvious, but she has no way to contact this person, or why she would in the first place, but she’s already grasping for straws in the dark. The address says ‘Greenleaf Street’, and Noa has no idea where that is, but someone who seems to be the manager of the convenience store has appeared behind the front counter and Noa works up the nerve to ask him, in a small voice,   
“Where is Greenleaf Street?”   
“Take a left outta here, go down the main road,” he points, “it’s about half a mile that way.”   
Noa nods, wishing she had her notebook to write it down. She’d always been pretty terrible at directions.   
As she walks, she tries her best to keep her head up. Maybe Terra Cotta was someone who knew where Saphron was, maybe she was someone who could help Noa…  
She arrives at Greenleaf Street after about fifteen minutes of walking and wondering. The number on the paper is fifteen, so hopefully locating 15 Greenleaf Street will be easy. The houses are numbered ascending from 1, alternating between sides, with even numbered houses on the right and odd on the left.   
Street lamps come on as she walks, and what had previously been a sprinkle has turned into a steady rain.   
Finally, finally, she reaches 15 Greenleaf Street, but now what? She has no idea what to do or expect. Should she ring the doorbell? She has not even the slightest clue.  
Trembling, she knocks at the door.   
“Saphron…?” She asks quietly. But it is not Saphron who opens the door, it’s a tall and skinny dark skinned girl about Saphron’s age wearing glasses and her hair in a neat ponytail.  
“N?” The girl asks cautiously. Noa nods, she immediately trusts her, her voice is welcoming. “I’m Saphron’s girlfriend. Will you come inside?”


End file.
